The one thing I knew with absolute certainty when I finished A Little Life – emotionally drained and unstable – was that Hanya Yanagihara has shitloads of talent. Not much of a result, considering I knew that already since reading The People in the Trees, her debut novel. It took me a while to get my thoughts sorted on the book itself and I’m not sure I’m entirely done with it even now.

Yanagihara’s Booker-nominated second book is a tough one to read, probably the most difficult one I’ve ever finished. It follows Jude, a brilliant man with a horrible past, and the lives of people around him. After all the buzz, I believe it’s no spoiler to say that the story deals with abuse and its consequences. It does not hold back when describing them.

The book – over 700 pages – is not just about abuse, it’s also about friendship, love, art, ambition, houses, food and many other things; it’s a book of impressive richness and depth. But it’s understandable why the reception has largely focussed on the abuse: it IS the trigger for everything else in the book and it’s also impossible to ignore. There are pages and pages of it, awful and rage-inducing and impossibly sad.

I had to negotiate my way through the text and I developed a technique that allowed me to keep going: I skipped ahead to see how long the chapter was, whether it was a ‘bad’ one or a ‘good’ one and tried to gauge, without reading too much, what it was about. Prepared with that knowledge, I was able to suffer through the darkest pages, counting them in my head. You could never entirely prepare yourself, of course, as there were flashbacks in the ‘good’ chapters and nothing really prepares you for the evil people do. But I did read all of it and in a strange echo of the book, it felt like a coping strategy of someone with an addiction or trauma. I was constantly bargaining: I can put the book aside when I’ve read another 5 pages, another 4 pages, another 3,2,1.

As I said, I believe Yanagihara is an extremely talented writer. She is not a stylist the way Salter or Waugh were: her sentences are pretty straightforward, but they are convincing. They just are. You read them and there seems to be nothing lost in translation, they are life directly transferred to the page, without any ornament or self-consciousness. She is also frighteningly intelligent, great with ideas and systems and constructs. If anyone ever starts droning on about how the books by women are intimate and small and lack ambition, just hit them with A Little Life.

Because I came to this book relatively late, I read quite a few reviews before I started and was familiar with the main criticisms. And while I did see where these came from, I began to feel about the book like a family member: it was OK if I said bad things about it, but not when others did – because they didn’t really understand! I don’t think it’s a perfect book, but I do believe some of the criticism is misplaced. Because everything in the book is deliberate, it’s there for a reason. People say it’s too dark, too long, too melodramatic, too black-and-white. But the darkness is the point, the length, the range of experiences, the contrasts, they ARE the point. If the abuse had been less explicit, the success less complete, the people less good – then the central point about the possibility of redemption would not have been as powerful.

There is a pattern of thought that I find recurs not only when people read, but when they do anything at all: things that deviate too much from our own experience often seem to us overly dramatic. If someone is a bit more glamorous than us, we envy them. If they are extremely glamorous, we think it’s too much, almost grotesque, exaggerated, unnatural. When someone is much more intelligent, we find it difficult to connect. (Conversely, if they are less glamorous or intelligent than us, they are boring and inconsequential.) We sometimes think people who are starving, in awful pain, running from a war must have done SOMETHING wrong, because we cannot comprehend that such suffering can be real and so arbitrary. It is difficult to stretch our own experience to cover the extremes of good and bad, because we are, most of us, small people with small thoughts and small deeds. But as Yanagihara said in one of her interviews, Jude’s story is maybe not probable, but it’s certainly possible. Insane suffering, wealth, addiction, success, trauma, talent, beauty – they all exist.

It’s not to say there’s nothing to identify or connect with if you haven’t experienced those extremes. Surely, everyone knows the feeling of not being able to repair something that has been broken, even if you want to fix it so bad – it’s just gone and ruined. We all have friends and families and ambitions. We might love architecture or be embarrassed by living with our parents or sectretly enjoy corporate life. We may be gay or black or confused. Or maybe we like baking. It has all of that, too.

There is no doubt in my mind that this book is a stunning achievement. It must have been terrible to write. It will be a classic. I find it impossible to say if I liked it, though, or rate it (I gave it 4.5 stars on Goodreads, but what does it mean?). I’m not sure I’m able to separate the sense of achievement about having read it from my feelings about the book. I have difficulties thinking of it as a book at all, it’s this awe-inspiring monolith that sits somewhere between my throat and my stomach, massive, indigestible. But I don’t think it’s because this book is too big, it’s because I’m too small.